Romance Linguistics 2008

The sixteen papers here united have been selected from the 38th Linguistic Symposium of the Romance Languages held in Champaign-Urbana in 2008. The papers, whose authors include both well-known researchers and younger scholars, cover a broad and truly interdisciplinary range of topics in phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and their interfaces. Among the plethora of topics examined are stress in Quebec French, vowel deletion in Tuscan Italian, bare singulars in Brazilian Portuguese, case in Romanian, and hiatus in Argentine Spanish. The volume’s novelty is to extend the traditional scope of linguistic inquiry to dynamic cognitive and societal connections between Romance and other languages, investigating, among others, how Spanish phonotactics informs psycholinguistic models of speech production, how bilinguals express subject pronouns in Chipilo contact Spanish relative to monolingual Mexican Spanish, and whether Spanish-speaking immigrants in Montreal acquire the constraints typical to natives in loanword adaptations.